New for Colorado gardeners in 2013: The fabulous and the firewise

Tennessee purple coneflower, one of the new Plant Select plants for Western gardens (Mike Kintgen, provided by Plant Select)

If you felt a ripple in the gardening force last week, you were right in tune with Denver and the rest of the Western landscape universe: ProGreen Expo was happening, and the combined botanical knowledge packed into the Colorado Convention Center could have warped the orbit of a small planet. Or just the mindset of a Colorado gardener.

Here’s just a sampling of what I found out at ProGreen. The green industry – and here I’m talking plants, not medicinal marijuana or solar panels – is responding to the Front Range’s warming climate, smaller lot sizes and continued drought conditions. These three snippets prove it.

Scott’s Clematis, a.k.a. Scott’s Sugarbowls, one of the three new Plant Select Petites (Kirk Fieseler, provided by Plant Select)

1. Plant Select,the program run by Colorado State University, the Denver Botanic Gardens and local nurseries (and members, and demonstration gardens, and everyone who buys a plant with that little “Plant Select” tag on it) continues its tradition of announcing about a half-dozen new varieties each year, plants that have undergone extensive trials in Colorado’s tough conditions. The pros find out how cold hardy, how drought tolerant, how clay tolerant they are, so Colorado gardeners don’t have to. It means you pay a little more for them, but are more assured of success.

3. Fire-wise frenzy. In addition to lots of encouragement and gorgeous pictures of trees we ought to see more of (check out “Galaxy” hybrid magnolia), state and local foresters are continuing their hard work to educate Coloradans about fire-wise landscaping. The 2012 wildfires, especially the Waldo Canyon fires, showed foresters that all the things they’d been telling people for years were correct: Get the pine needles out of gutters; keep the flammable materials away from the house; and keep the landscaping lean, clean and green. Among the tips they gave the pros:

Conifers generally aren’t fire-wise, and that’s because of their high resin content. In other words, their sap is fuel. But you don’t have to remove all of them from your property or disavow planting and loving them. Proper placement, thinning and pruning will cut fire hazards even in a conifer collection.

Fire-wise is often water-wise – in fact, there’s a huge overlap among the plants that resist fire and those that sip water. There are sedums and echinacea and wild blue flax on the official firewise list.

Fire-wise plants are tidy: In other words, they don’t accumulate large amounts of dead branches, bark, needles or leaves. If your trees are the opposite of tidy, wield that rake and push that broom.

Finally, there’s a lot of help out there for you if you live in the urban-wildland interface. The Denver Botanic Gardens just had a seminar on fire-wise landscaping, and the Colorado State Forest service has a plethora of free online publications; each one is linked to the others, so wade in and get the knowledge you need.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.